Vitalik Buterin proposes EIP-8288 for Ethereum's I-star upgrade to reduce quantum-safe privacy costs and adopt RISC-V as canonical instruction set.
Tech & Launches ·
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has promoted EIP-8288, a proposal he co-authored in June, for inclusion in I-star—the network upgrade scheduled after Hegota. The measure aims to drastically reduce the computational overhead of quantum-resistant private transactions by bundling cryptographic verification into a single proof per block rather than processing it during execution. Buterin estimates that transactions currently requiring roughly 10 million gas to secure against quantum threats could drop to the low tens of thousands of gas.
EIP-8288 works by moving heavy cryptography off-chain. Instead of storing full signatures and proofs on-chain, transactions would declare short 96-byte "dependencies" describing claims about signatures or data validity. Mempool nodes would collect these claims every second, generate a single recursive STARK proof covering all of them simultaneously, and include that unified proof in the block. Post-quantum signatures today consume 150,000 to 200,000 gas to verify; STARK proofs run into millions.
A critical consequence of adoption would be designating RISC-V—an open instruction set architecture used in chip design—as Ethereum's canonical instruction set for expressing recursive proofs. Buterin has characterized this as a substantial decision requiring careful consideration. EIP-8288 depends on Frames, another transaction overhaul he promoted separately, and neither proposal has yet been formally assigned to a fork. I-star itself remains unscheduled beyond Buterin's indication that it will precede Ethereum's broader "Lean era" reconstruction.